Good Defenses Make Good Neighbors

It takes a special vision, both clear and cockeyed, to see the present as if it were the past. Half a century separates the two acts of Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park,” a spiky and damningly insightful new comedy set in 1959 and 2009. In both parts of this production, which opened Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons, Mr. Norris is examining his subjects through the same merciless telescope, with a historian’s distance and an ethnographer’s detachment.

Compare this play’s two sets of characters, portrayed by one quick-witted ensemble (which includes Frank Wood and Annie Parisse), fumbling through the conversational minefields of the explosive subject of race. You’ll find that the early 21st century comes across just as quaintly mannered and shortsighted as the mid-20th century. When this crafty little satire ends, the world of February 2010 suddenly looks as dated and remote as a sepia-toned street scene.

Mr. Norris’s two-fold period piece, directed by Pam MacKinnon, is set in a fictional building of historic landmark status. Clybourne Park, you see, was the all-white Chicago neighborhood on which a hopeful African-American Southside family set its sights in “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 epochal drama.

The house in Mr. Norris’s play  406 Clybourne Street, to be exact  is the dream house that Hansberry built, the place her upwardly mobile Younger family was planning to inhabit. In the first act the Youngers haven’t arrived yet. In the second they’re long gone, and Clybourne Park has become a very different, predominantly black neighborhood. And it is now a white family that wants to move into an area that shows every promise of being thoroughly regentrified.

Those of you who, for reasons of sentiment or politics, regard “A Raisin in the Sun” as sacred needn’t be appalled. Mr. Norris is in no way parodying or even deconstructing Hansberry’s play. (George C. Wolfe already did that quite ruthlessly, thank you, in his “Colored Museum.”) Instead he imagines the tangled back stories and real-estate negotiations related to that house on Clybourne Street (why was it being sold so cheaply to the Youngers?) to consider how Americans once talked and continue to talk about race.

Or to be more specific, “Clybourne Park” concerns, to borrow from Raymond Carver, what we talk about when we talk about race. Mr. Norris focuses on the evasions, euphemisms and tongue-tied paralysis that afflict such discussions and comes to the conclusion that talk  at least among the all-American solipsists he portrays  is worse than cheap: it’s valueless.

This is hardly a comforting realization. But as was amply demonstrated by “The Pain and Itch,” his 2006 portrait of a Thanksgiving dinner during which a big turkey and bigger egos were consumed by a family of vultures, Mr. Norris specializes in comedies of discomfort. “Clybourne Park” is breezier and less scabrous than “The Pain and the Itch.”

But Mr. Norris is still sprinkling the theatrical equivalent of itching powder on his characters and on us. And for me the effect is more unsettling and entertaining than that of another, blunter work, now on Broadway, by a better-known playwright on the same subject: David Mamet’s “Race.”

Although “Clybourne Park” has some of the contrivances of an intricate old-fashioned plot  including a document to be hidden in the first act and exhumed in the second  its story is mostly a setup for a series of misbegotten debates. The first half finds a haunted, fretful, middle-aged husband and wife, Russ (a wonderful Mr. Wood) and Bev (Christina Kirk), packing for their imminent move from their longtime residence (designed with classic “Leave It to Beaver” coziness by Daniel Ostling).

Their preparations are disrupted by visitors: Jim (Brendan Griffin), the local minister; Albert (Damon Gupton), the husband of Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), the family’s maid; and most significantly, Karl Lindner (Jeremy Shamos) and his deaf wife, Betsy (Ms. Parisse), who is pregnant.

Karl Lindner is the same man who appears, briefly and noxiously, in “A Raisin in the Sun,” where he tries to talk the Youngers out of moving into his neighborhood. Having failed with them, he has re-emerged in Mr. Norris’s play to convince Russ and Bev to stop the sale. This leads to a deeply unpleasant exchange of words, including assorted “well-meaning,” poisoned clichés that we are all of course beyond now.

O.K., so we’re not. In the second act another married couple expecting their first child (Ms. Parisse and Mr. Shamos again) have come to the now derelict house to discuss renovations. In addition to two lawyer-broker types (Mr. Griffin and Ms. Kirk), they are joined by Kevin and Lena (Mr. Gupton and Ms. Dickinson), who have lived in the area for years and have some concerns about the newcomers’ plans for their house. This leads to a deeply unpleasant  well, you finish the sentence.

Fortunately “Clybourne Park” has more going for it than the implicit joke in its two-part structure with the inevitable “plus ça change” punch line. As in “Pain,” Mr. Norris has written dialogue that is most notable for the way it is either unheard or misheard by others.

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From left, Frank Wood, Damon Gupton, Annie Parisse and Jeremy Shamos in Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The people in “Clybourne Park” talk, but they don’t listen. And their talk is made up of found phrases and jokes reshaped into a hard-edged personal defense system. The fashions in verbal armor may change as much as they do in clothes. (And Ilona Somogyi’s costumes here are sociologically spot-on.) But words remain what people hide behind, even from those closest to them.

Mr. Norris’s awareness of how lonely this defensiveness leaves people is what saves “Clybourne Park” from heartlessness. It seems poetically right that for reasons you’ll have to discover for yourself, the words “Ulan Bator,” spoken with long vowels by Russ, become the most poignantly loving in the play.

I would quote some of the better lines except that they dry up and die on the page. It’s the blundering rhythms and off-key melodies of the spoken dialogue that make it so memorable and funny, and that most effectively make Mr. Norris’s unhappy but trenchant case for the emptiness of most human communication.

Ms. MacKinnon understands the signal importance of getting those rhythms right, and her cast doesn’t let her down. The performances, especially those of Ms. Kirk, are mannered to the point of caricature. Yet that feels right too. Cartoonishness tends to set in with people who subscribe unthinkingly to the lingos and styles of their times. Everyone wants to fit in, right?

Not that any of Mr. Norris’s characters ever feel, deep down, that they fit in anywhere, which is why they’re so threatened by the thought of neighborhood invaders. “And what’s wrong with comfort?” Bev asks in the first act. “Aren’t we allowed comfort anymore?” Sorry, Bev, but no. Not if you’re in a Bruce Norris play.